The first location visited to day was the Sunnyslope Mennonite Church located at 9835 North 7th Street.

The weather cooperated today, with lots of sunshine, little wind, and moderate temperatures. People started showing up early at this location, but were not generally let in until very close to the official starting time.

I walked into there area where they were about to start processing turn ins. A woman walked in with me and I asked her what she was turning in, and why. She was a widow, she had inherited a pistol from her husband who was a WWII veteran. He had used it to successfully defend them in the desert, but now he had passed and she wanted to get rid of it. I asked to look into her bag, and there was a WWII German style holster in good shape, with something in it.

We had arrived at the turn-in table, and the supervisor there said that I could not take pictures. I advised the widow that her pistol could easily be worth $400 as a WWII war trophy, but she said that she was not interested and simply wanted to get rid of it.

I was told that the media was not allowed on the site for privacy reasons, and to leave the secured area.

Outside the secured area numerous private buyers had set up and were arriving.

Cars were starting to line up to bring guns to turn in.

It was the start of a very interesting day. More tomorrow. The early start, long day, and drive back from Phoenix have left me a bit fatigued. I ran into a few minor difficulties in Phoenix, and have not been able to get online until my return to Yuma.

A Harvard University study dating from the mid-1990s concluded that buybacks were largely ineffective in reducing gun violence because they weren’t getting the right kinds of weapons off the street.

“The upshot of that study was that gun buybacks were listed in the category of what doesn’t work,” Woodward says. “I think people may feel more safe ... [but] the gun buyback stuff is really working at the margins.”

there are a few other reasons buy backs are bad to..

...they disarm the good guys all the better for the thug..

...thugs their old junkers to get money to buy new and better glocks

... the money wasted on buy backs could be used to pay teams of detectives riding herd on community recidivistics

...the ‘turned in weapons’ might have been examined and used to solve crimes already committed but they’re destroyed...or these guns are the ones least likely to be used in crimes in the first place.

....buybacks are being sold as a way to decrease the number of weapons in circulation in hopes that firearms violence will thus be reduced. It’s a hope divorced from reality. Such buybacks allow for politicians to grandstand and may make the public think something worthwhile is being done. But they’re generally a waste of time, money and effort that could be dedicated elsewhere.

....Buybacks don’t work for the same reason gun control doesn’t work: The bad guys don’t go by the rules, which, come to think of it, is why they’re bad guys. They don’t turn in guns. They don’t obey gun laws anymore than they do other laws. They can and do always find guns no matter how hard it is made for them.

....Some cities make buybacks so lucrative that dealers make a killing by selling guns for less than the buyers can then get from the city. Oakland, Calif., offered $300 per gun, exhausting its $80,000 budget in the first few minutes and having to issue $170,000 in IOUs. bwahah can you spell ‘SAPS’?

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